the cause of your grief
by Smidgie
Summary: Heathcliff finds a moment's peace, and Catherine brings him dinner. M. Cathy/Heathcliff, Catherine/Heathcliff.


Heavily based on the 2009 TV movie with Tom Hardy and Charlotte Riley, but can fit with any version.

Disclaimer: Wuthering Heights was written by the late Emily Bronte. Anything you recognise, I don't own.

* * *

In the end, in this, he has no one to blame but himself. In everything else, the dreadful mockery of existence he has come to inhabit - that is all the cause of others. He himself is blameless in it, trapped in circumstance wrought by hideous fate and more hideous yet characters along the way seeking to destroy him. But in this newest sin, this great and monstrous lunacy, he alone is to blame. He cannot even blame her. She is little more than a child, a babe-girl caught up in the moment where he had buried himself in the past and felt the excruciating agony that haunted him at every moment slide back, a little.

This is how it happens.

She brings him tea and supper, long after the usual hour for such things. The tentative knocking at the door makes him want to tear off his ears, but with the usual effort he manages to sit upright in the bed, Cathy's bed.

It's the girl.

No one else would be foolish enough to come near him when he is in her room. Hell, no one else would be foolish enough to come near him at all - save for the boy, his nephew, not his son. His son is a weakling, a whining, puling milksop of a lad, and he infinitely prefers the raw strength of his nephew, even if he would never tell the boy so.

But it's the girl, the pretty echo of the past, the colours diluted but present nevertheless. He dredges up the effort to wave a hand at the bedside table and she nods. He blinks away the crust in his eyes and like he's summoned her there from beyond the grave, Cathy is there in her place. The illusion lasts only a moment but oh, he knows the location of it now, knows where and how to feel his way back to her shadow in his mind. She fills him with new vigour as though a hot wire has been jammed through his veins, all torture and ferocity and life, and for the first time in eighteen hours he has the energy to stand.

He rises, towering over the frightened girl, and for once she does not shrink back, her eyes darting to every point of his face save his eyes. In the half light, the glimmer of her eyes are not so bright, dulled by the darkness, and the dark thunder of her hair streams down around her shoulders, wild and free. His savage love, in a simpler time.

She darts past him to settle the tray on the little table beside the bed, and he seizes the opportunity. A flick of the foot and she trips, falling flat on her back on her mother's bed, skirts riding up to reveal heavenly ankles and the dainty swell of a calf. It is enough to obliterate her, to find Cathy in her features and the past falls away. And o God in hell her feet are bare, blackened on the soles, but he is kneeling to take them in his hands regardless. To lift them to his face, to suckle on her toes, to feel the crust of dirt and sweat on his tongue and rejoice in the _realness _of it. Gritty on his teeth and bitter in his mouth, he traces the way to sweeter waters, to where small brown feet and freckled knees become skin like silver silk and black curls damp with sweat.

To plunge his tongue into that hallowed opening, to feel her throb around him, to close his lips on those folds as sweet and wet as dew on the grass - well. It would take a stronger man than he to resist the temptations of the body calling him to war.

He laves tenderly at those lovely curls, and feels the shudder run through her, her thighs clamp around his head in shock and astonishment and _more_.

"Heathcliff!" And it's that, the raw sound of his name without salutation, that cements the illusion. He flips her skirts over his head and dives in, noticing too late the faint red dried on her thighs. Copper and iron burst on his tastebuds and he moans at this further evidence of her reality, for in every vision he has had of her, she had never been on her monthly. Once perhaps it would have repulsed him, but he has curled up in her grave with her and that agony was only eclipsed by the joy he felt being with her once more. A little blood is nothing to that, and he laps at it rapturously, delving deeper, licking at every trace of crimson _life_, feeling it smear on his cheeks, in his hair, on his brow.

He's harder than he's been in years, his cock an iron shaft throbbing and protesting against the confines of his trousers. He fumbles at the laces with one hand, spreading her open with the other to suckle on that sweet little bud as she trembles and gasps.

"Oh, bloody hell -" Hardly a curse at all but it gets him sweating, gets him rock hard and aching, and as much as he'd like her to come screaming with his tongue deep in her hole, there are more pressing things. He flails up and out from her skirts, not even noticing the candle has guttered down because he can see her perfectly regardless. Cathy, Catherine Earnshaw, his life, his soul, his love.

He kisses her, ravenous for the taste of her mouth, and she kisses back equally as violently, her hands scrabbling over his skin as he works at the ties of his trousers one-handed. The other is fisted deep in her hair, burying his hand in the heavy thick waves and wishing he could drown inside of them too. Yes. Stay with Cathy and never leave her. That is his desire.

Her hands find the whip marks, Hindley's regards from so long ago, and the shudder than runs through him was one of raw desire. Her fingers trace those ancient scars, and sensation rips through him, memories tearing at the edges. His Cathy had traced the raw wounds on his shoulders after the flogging and he'd shuddered then too, teeth clenching in agony/ecstasy at her hands on him. He's always been undone by her, the April slide of her skin against his own, on the moors they loved so well.

His trousers finally come loose and he kicks them off, putting his hand to better use to slip inside her chemise and fit his hand around her breast. She makes a sweet feminine noise of contentment and pulls himscloser, and it is then, her sudden gentleness he hadn't known he craved as well as her fire, that he needs to have her. Needs like the crops need rain and the flowers need sun.

"My darling, my love, open for me," he rasps, hardly knowing his own voice, lost in the soft pressure of her under him. His head finds the crook of her neck as though it belongs there and oh, dear God, any god will do, but she smells like the past. Cathy's scent, fresh and green and alive, the scent of the moors after a thunderstorm and clean sweet woman and love.

Hell.

And those precious thighs inch apart and he gasps and shudders and thrusts against her soft slickness, wet with her blood and where his mouth had been on her. And something else as well, the knowledge of it driving him mad. Her desire for him, for him, for no one else ever else, ever again. He will keep her forever.

Something tickles at the back of his mind but he is too far gone to pay attention to it, not when this exquisite creature is bare in front of him. His son's wife - no, his wife, his beauty, his enchanting Cathy. As they are supposed to be. He nudges her thighs completely apart, buries the hot aching flesh between her legs and shudders and feels like he's coming apart at the seams. She isn't here and she can't be here and she is here and he is home, his head nestling into the tender flesh of her throat, suckling at the pulse point like he can take her very life into him.

"Fuck, Cathy," he groans, rutting against her frantically, chasing that peak he's so long been denied. He'd never spoken such words to her before, but there is no holding anything back, not anymore. "Darling girl, darling heart. Come for me, let me feel you shaking around my cock, my sweet one, yes, my girl -"

She reaches the precipice and near _howls_, seizing his shirt in her fists and bucking hard, and she does not need to speak before he can hear her in his head. It seems like he's always been able to hear her in his head.

And he's seeing stars, balls deep in her cunt, straining and pushing and so close so close so very yes. He feels his toes clench, his spine arch, and as she flutters around him he feels the first peace in well over eighteen years. The noises he's making would embarrass him but this is Cathy, his Cathy, and there is no secrets from her, not anymore.

For a long time after he lies on top of her, well aware he is crushing her breath a little but not caring. Cathy has endured greater weights in this life than him and he knows, from the delicate pats on his shoulders and backs, comforting little things, that she is content with him once more.

He frowns. Something creaks like a rusty door, a ruined hinge, a gate opening that he does not want to see inside. Something wrong, something not quite right, but with Cathy beneath him he does not -

Those dainty pats on his shoulders, even there now as he stiffens. Cathy. Comforting him.

Cathy did not comfort. It was not in her nature.

"Get out," he whispers, rolling off of her, and it feels like someone has ripped his heart from his chest because _she is not Cathy._

"Mr Heathcliff…" she protests, yanking her dress down, gathering her torn smallclothes. There is a terrible hope in her eyes.

"OUT!" he roars and she flinches. Cathy would not have flinched. Cathy would have screamed back.

She goes, sobbing like a scolded child - after all, isn't that what she is? And he is left alone with only his ghosts.

He curls up in the warmth she'd left. Cathy had been warm, up until, of course, she wasn't.

This much, at least, he can keep.


End file.
